Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

soft phones suck balls

we keep our landline as a way to have our cake and eat it to with leaving the kids home alone safely but still refusing to buy them cell phones yet (10 and 8 years old). i will admit we adults really never use it but the 10yo has taken to calling her friends on it.

They’re turning off landlines in the UK soon, and the VoIP replacements won’t work in a power cut either. “Use a mobile” say the regulators.

Oh really? I like the idea of having a landline but the fact you have to pay line rental or whatever for it makes it too expensive. But I had hope I would get one one day.

Losing access to emergency numbers during a power outage hasn't even been a concern when we went to mobile only. First thing we do when the lights go out is pull up the utility company's website and report our block, check which lines have gone red. As long as you've got a backup charged, I'd even say that having access to a cell tower is handier.

Kinda like the argument of "Oh I keep a gun in the house because what if someone breaks in," but dialed back a thousand percent.

I do not miss the sound of three or four phones in different rooms suddenly ringing all at once.

We have had a "bundle" deal (phone/cable/internet) for probably 20 years now. Several of our streaming services and various other things are inextricably linked to that account. We're simply too lazy to investigate how to unbundle it without losing something important. (Plus the system is too baroquely interwoven to make this easy. I have no doubt this is on purpose.)

For some reason I unplugged the landline phone like two years ago. Haven't bothered to plug it back in.

That said, I am well aware of the thing where old-school landline phones work even when the electricity is out. So I do keep an extremely old traditional phone that I can plug in in case of nuclear alien zombie militia apocalypse or whatever.

Right now I am telling myself that the reason I keep a traditional landline phone line in place is for emergency preparedness. Yes, in my darker moments I think it's just because I don't want to deal with the logistical excrementstorm of untangling all these various accounts and passwords. But please don't mess with my carefully cultivated system of illusions, thxbye

it’s definitely on purpose. some providers will even give you separate contracts for each of the services which each have slightly different lengths. they’re combined for billing purposes but make it more complicated to switch if you decide you want to.

that said i found it absolutely worthwhile to switch to full fibre to the house and cancel the landline. faster and cheaper. i don’t have cable and don’t want it but i’m sure there are people out there selling fibre/tv packages.

I have an irrational fear of me or other half becoming unconscious (falling down stairs, whatever) when looking after the kids and I want an easy way for them to phone 999 rather than having to have them remember how to do it on a locked smart phone. Familiar as they are with apps, they obviously don't make phone calls themselves.

I do keep an extremely old traditional phone that I can plug in in case of nuclear alien zombie militia apocalypse or whatever.

<3 <3 I have one too ... I don't pay for a landline but I still have the phone in a drawer next to the phone jack ... because I do think about these things

sarahell: Right! They say that no one expects the nuclear alien zombie militia apocalypse. But one could pretty easily write the script of an M. Night Shyamalan-style disaster movie where the power grid is out, the cellular networks have shut down, and all seems lost.

But! There's like six late-middle-aged Luddite dorks who still have conventional phones and they are somehow able to communicate over landlines and defeat the zombie alien shape-shifting ninjas or whatever, through good old-fashioned moxie and unhackable obsolete technology. They use postcards and mimeographs and party lines and maybe somehow involve 8-track tapes.

(Totally writing this screenplay now, but I might go with reptiles instead of zombies. Thoughts?)

I haven't had a landline in 18 years, but when I did I did keep an old basic phone around, one that plugs into a phone jack but doesn't have a separate cord that plugs into your mains electrical outlet. It will work in a blackout, and is also good for diagnostic purposes.

i think for box office draw, you should go with cassettes ... the dorks will make each other mix tapes. Reptiles are good. You might also want to consider fleas or some sort of parasitic wasp that spreads disease to humans from rodents and rodent adjacent animals (rats, mice, raccoons, possums) that are attracted to contemporary abundance. It would make for a good "DO YOU SEE?!" theme that can also incorporate adorable fluffy household pets that may or may not be disease carriers.

man i guess i've missed that whole trend, but yeah, mostly sounds like a backward step to me. the mix tapes sound good though.

probably should star Mark Wahlberg ... and a dog

sarahell: Okay, cassette tapes and parasitic wasps it is. Many thanks, you will get an executive producer credit and four points on the box-office gross. Have your agent call my agent.

Jokes aside, here is a literally 100% true thing that happened, and is actually relevant to the thread.

A few years ago, a friend of mine found some music stuff that had been recorded on a 4-track Tascam cassette Portastudio. He didn't have the equipment to even assess the quality of it to determine whether it was worth digitizing. Fortunately I had a decent Portastudio in the attic, as I never throw anything away. So I casually lent it to my friend, without a second thought.

Then the world subsequently descended into pandemic chaos.

Two days ago I saw him in a bar and he handed me a grocery bag and said, "Merry Christmas." The bag contained... my old 4-track Tascam cassette Portastudio. What I didn't realize was that the tape that I had left in it was the Counting Crows' August and Everything After. Peak cringe.

landline people: have you actually used yours during a power outage? We held onto a landline for a long time because my partner lived in Michigan during the 2003 blackout. She had a landline at her apt but none of her (grad student) friends did, so she had to call all their families to let them know they were okay. After that we were stubborn landline maintainers even though people made fun of us.

Jump to 2012 or so and we're living in Oregon, when a snowstorm knocks down a ton of trees across the city and our power goes out for a couple days. Within minutes of the outage our landline no longer works, not because of the phone but because the landlines were all digital now.

Now living in Quebec: last week a friend was in an area hit by a terrible storm, the power went out, and apparently some of the local radio stations stopped broadcasting, plus lots of gas stations couldn't pump gas, etc.

how many of you old-timers are still leasing these phones you keep in your drawers.

lol

i think mark s rented his television until a few years ago

I remember being with my grandpa when he went to an at&t store (!) to get a new phone, this had to have been in the early 90s at latest, and being absolutely baffled when he was taking a phone in to turn it in, because it was an old one he thought the phone company owned?

I was pretty young but was completely confused by this entire thing. Grandpa, the phone company doesn't own your phone! But maybe they still did?

there was an actual at&t store at the shopping mall (!), with a selection of phones to buy, and this was pre-cell phones. just a weird crossover in time

I remember going with my dad to the Southwestern Bell store, where they had all their available models, each set on podiums spread throughout the store. The Mickey Mouse one was cost extra per month. You'd pick the one you wanted, and the phone people would go into the back and bring out a box.

When you start thinking about it, what a disgusting concept, hygiene-wise.

all those children wandering in, picking up the handset, and hollering at mickey

Yeah, you definitely didn't want the floor model.

Dad leased one of these:

https://i.imgur.com/c3MaS9l.jpg

a conversation piece, for having conversations

I "rent" my modem + router from our ISP. When we got a new one a while back I did have to return the old one to the Videotron store.

I honestly can't remember how this worked in the US.

cable companies try to do a hard sell on cable modems for sure, but they've relented now that you can buy them at nearly every electronics store for a price that's equal to between six months and a year of their rental fee

that reminds me i need to make my biannual call to xfinity to see if i am eligible for any "promotions"

lol my parents still have the very first xfinity wifi router. totally unsupported now. i've tried to get them to ask comcast for an upgrade which i'm sure they could easily have for free but they don't want the hassle.

hm yeah I should look into this. We got the new one during the depths of the pandemic when a) we desperately needed the wi-fi to work while having two different Zoom calls at the same time with zero problems and b) shopping was generally a pain in the ass.

Telecoms in Canada are notoriously overpriced and the market is extremely noncompetitive, but I am probably being ripped off, on reflection

Pretty sure my initial signup rate is about to expire, meaning my (ultra-basic) cable/internet bill is about to double. Gonna have to call the company and figure out how to knock it back down again.

threaten to leave, and be willing to stay on the call for 45 minutes.

In maybe 1978-82, my parents had a jokey old-style phone with the separate earpiece, like

https://d328c8xxrtt5uf.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/09003922/5cd376b1a2514.jpg

...and while they thought it was cute, everyone else just thought it was an annoying affected pain to use.

landline people: have you actually used yours during a power outage?
yes, many times

Mark G does your ilx mail work?

You know it. And, cheers.

i went to the AT&T store when I got my current phone 4 years ago ... I had to get the sim card and they had to activate it ... I know plenty of people that buy new iPhones and have the price of the phone added to the monthly phone bill.

apple’s literally starting a phone leasing side to their business iirc

Last fall when we had our kitchen wall re-tiled I had the guy cover up the existing landline jack because I haven't had a regular phone for almost 15 years. I think there might be one somewhere else in the house, but in five years I've never bothered to look for that or for a cable hookup.

There's a landline cord running behind my bookcase, it looks super old.. it ends at a wall-mount plate in a sort of of closet by the bathroom (dressing room, maybe?) which is a weird fucking place to chat on the phone in a studio apartment

semi recent builds like mine might find those phone jacks are done with ethernet wire. easy to convert for networking!

kind of a big, dumb one, but, television. television was a step backward

Karl, did you prefer listening to The Shadow and Amos & Andy while sitting on the parlor floor munching a box of Cracker Jacks?

can't speak for Karl, but growing up we had this one little box set of 4-5 cassettes of old radio programs, and the two episodes each of The Shadow and Lights Out remain more evocative and moody in my memory than any TV episode i can remember seeing as a kid. even the Lassie episode where they got stuck under power lines.

I listen to the old CBS Radio Mystery Theater episodes sometimes, with the ominous opening music... the show was kind of a throwback when it came out (1970s) but sometimes just having the spooky audio can be really cool

https://www.cbsrmt.com/

I honestly miss living off-grid and running our lights and a tape deck at night, just going through mountains of cassette tapes in the middle of the woods, 15 miles away from anything resembling civilization.

When I was young we listened to a lot of public radio, like Prairie Home Companion, My Word, My Music, Car Talk. We had some old-school radio stuff on vinyl and cassettes, like the Shadow and War of the Worlds.

As an adult, I associate old-school radio dramas (Gunsmoke, Johnny Dollar, etc.) with Sunday evenings because our local public radio station did (and still fucking DOES) play them in a program called "The Big Broadcast." I am convinced that no one under the age of 85 even wants to hear this shit, but there it is, occupying the radio for hours.

I can only ever greet that program with a vaguely sweet melancholy. When I was dating my now-wife, we typically spent weekends together, then returned to our separate apartments on Sunday night. So The Big Broadcast always meant that the weekend was over and we had to return to drab routines.

Radio 4 (via BBC Sounds) has kept the radio drama format alive, and it's not all Archers... there was a scifi/horror series called Murmurs that's really inventive & weird

If I have some repetitive, mind-numbing task at work I'll sometimes listen to stuff from their Horror/Supernatural collection.. it's a mix of old legacy reruns and new programs:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/category/drama-horrorandsupernatural

Audiobooks and podcasts (that I choose and control) are a different creature. I can only listen to them while driving.

My wife hates silence and will put on a podcast while trying to fall asleep. Not for me, but I respect a general de gustibus about this.